The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  Abruptly he recalled the jingly little bell over the door. If Woolsworth had come in while he was looking at the books, the bell would have rung. But it hadn’t rung. What did that mean? The man could easily have grabbed the bell and silenced it if he knew in advance where it hung. Or he could have cut the truck engine fifty yards up the road, coasted into the lot where he wouldn’t be easily seen from inside, and sneaked in through the back. …

  Calvin realized that his imagination had gone into high gear. Perhaps his brain was overheated. He turned the ignition key, immediately seeing that the “trunk open” light was illuminated. He climbed back out, and sure enough the trunk was open—not quite latched.

  Woolsworth had opened it. He must have. Who the hell else?

  Calvin looked inside the trunk. Aunt Iris was gone. His duffel was there but the box wasn’t. “That thieving son of a bitch,” he said out loud, and it came into his mind to call the cops. He had his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped open before he imagined the conversation and the cop’s almost certain reaction: “What did he steal …?”

  Then he thought of Shirley Fowler handing him the second, nearly identical box, knowing who he was as soon as he asked for that case of grape soda, and Hosmer’s telling him to avoid talking on the portable blower out here in the desert. Something was happening, and he had no idea on earth what it was, but probably it didn’t want the police. In an hour the sun would have sunk, the desert would be falling into darkness, and it would be cocktail hour at Chez Lymon, where he could look out safely on the puzzling world from the battlements—or in his case the bafflements. Laughing uneasily at his own joke, he shut the trunk, climbed back into the car, and headed east.

  THE DEAD MOUNTAINS

  Two miles past the Henderson cutoff, Calvin slowed down to twenty miles an hour and looked hard for the New Cyprus road, which he almost certainly would have missed if it weren’t for Shirley’s instructions. He swung a hard left turn down the embankment, the Dodge banging into a deep rut with a muffler-denting clank and up onto the semipaved track that led into the Dead Mountains and to the river on the other side. He passed a marker farther down, half hidden by greasewood. It was a rock the size and shape of a big headstone with the legend “New Cyprus” and a cross cut into it and then painted red, the paint mostly sandblasted off by the desert wind. It stood like an Easter Island sentinel with no apparent purpose, since it was a couple of hundred yards in—way too far to be made out from the highway.

  The narrow road wound upward through craggy hills, and soon he lost sight of the desert floor and was alone in a silent, empty landscape of barrel cactus and yucca and mesquite. After a climb of fifteen hundred feet or so, the road finally began to level out, and he reached a high pass through the rocks that opened onto a broad vista of endless, sun-beaten flatlands, broken here and there by dry ranges.

  The river flowed green and swift below, and beyond the river stretched the irrigated fields of the Fort Mohave Indian Reservation. Beyond that, off on the horizon, big thunderheads rose over distant mountains. The city of Needles lay hidden in the southwest, but upriver in the distance, maybe twelve miles, the outskirts of Bullhead City were just visible, and opposite that, on the Nevada shore, the high-rise casinos of Laughlin.

  He followed the road downward now, winding through narrow defiles and along the edges of cliffs until he came out onto a sort of plateau several hundred feet above New Cyprus. On either side of the road lay an old rock quarry littered with broken cut stones, many of them immense and set upright like dominoes and reminding him of old Celtic standing stones. A line of narrow-gauge railroad tracks that decades ago must have snaked their way to the desert floor descended into a steep gorge, and an ancient flatcar some twelve feet long stood rusting on the tracks. Grease-wood and mesquite grew up around the standing stones and through the tracks and the wheels of the flatcar, giving the place the air of a long-abandoned cemetery.

  He rounded a bend, the quarry disappearing behind him, and there was a clear view of New Cyprus along the river below. He could see stands of cottonwood and thickets of willow on the bank, and the roofs of houses and mobile homes as well as a lone building out on an island connected to shore by a narrow footbridge. That would be the Temple Bar, the lodge headquarters of the Knights of the Cornerstone, where the thieving Fred Woolsworth would allegedly be seeing Uncle Lymon one of these evenings soon. The ferry wharf stood empty at the upriver edge of the island, shaded by a corrugated aluminum roof, blindingly bright in the sunshine.

  It occurred to Calvin as the Dodge wound its way downward that he had to be careful of accusing Woolsworth of breaking into the trunk of his car. He had no real evidence of it, and if Woolsworth actually was a friend of Uncle Lymon, that sort of accusation would do nothing but poison the well. Calvin had been in the Gas’n’Go for a solid twenty minutes, and any number of people might have breezed into the lot, opened his trunk, and grabbed the box. The very fact that Woolsworth had walked inside to chat argued that it hadn’t been him. Most thieves didn’t go out of their way to talk with people they’d just robbed. Unless Woolsworth was merely a distraction … Unless he had an accomplice in another vehicle …

  A dry stretch of the old riverbed swung into view below, a wide, rocky swath right along the edge of the mountains, and he could see the Y-shape where the new bed had surged away from the old, back when the river had changed course nearly a century ago, shifting a little section of the border between California and Arizona two hundred yards to the east and forming the crescent-shaped piece of beachfront that had become New Cyprus. The land between the old riverbed and the new had remained unincorporated territory, a couple of hundred acres of essentially ownerless land, open to homesteading. His uncle and aunt hadn’t been among the first homesteaders, but they were old-timers by now, and the early homesteaders were long passed away. The sheer cliffs of the Dead Mountains, walling off New Cyprus both upriver and down, killed the potential for further development. Aside from Shangri-la there probably wasn’t another city in the world that was so clearly defined and isolated.

  He remembered his uncle having told him years ago that the residents of New Cyprus had taken a vote whether they’d live in Mountain Time or Pacific Standard, but couldn’t decide, and so had given up wearing watches altogether in accordance with the way things were done in Heaven. During the first visit out here that he could remember, Calvin had innocently asked his uncle what time it was, and his uncle had replied, “Not yet,” which had turned out to be a standard New Cyprus response to the query.

  The road dipped across the old riverbed, which lay white and sandy in the evening shadows, with scrubby-looking plants growing up between the boulders. On the other side it ended at Main Street near the downriver edge of town. Calvin turned left, upriver, crossing a bridge over a wide wash where storm waters had funneled down out of the hills since time immemorial. It was nearly seven thirty. The sun had dropped below the mountains now, and the town had fallen into evening, gratefully shedding ten degrees of heat. A sign on the roadside read “New Cyprus Town Limits” and beyond that lay a scattering of tree-shaded mobile homes on a surprisingly green, park-like lawn. People were sitting outside on lawn chairs, children and dogs were running around, and there was smoke rising from barbecues. He rolled the car window down, and the smell of the river and the cottonwoods brought with it a sudden childhood memory of playing in this very park, of the cozy interiors of mobile homes, and of sitting on the lawn watching bats flitting through the open spaces between the trees on an evening very much like this one.

  Several people looked up curiously as he drove past, and one man waved, as if he knew who Calvin was, which he probably did. Probably they all did, for some inscrutable reason. Calvin waved back, then took off his watch and put it into the glove box, switched off the air conditioner, and rolled down the window. His cell phone lay on the seat beside him, and he realized that he wouldn’t be wanting it, despite the chance of Hosmer calling him with further orders. W
hatever the Bible had to say about a nagging fishwife went double for cell phones. He turned the phone off and put it into the glove box with his watch, and turned right onto a small potholed street that led to the river, past the Cozy Diner cafe, a secondhand store, and the churchyard. Along the river stood several old homes on big lots, one of which was the Lymon estate.

  The house sat a few feet above the bank of the Colorado, shaded by a half dozen big cottonwoods. An arbor out front was draped with bougainvillea and honeysuckle and was a tangle of purple and red blossoms. Two swamp coolers perched on the roof, and Calvin could hear them rumbling as soon as he pulled in under the carport and turned off the engine. There was a wooden door set into the base of the wall at the top end of the carport—the entrance to a cellar bomb shelter or some other survivalist quirk. Apparently all the houses in New Cyprus had one, although he wasn’t sure about the trailers in the park. Maybe they had some kind of hatch in the floor.

  The shelter door stood open now, a light glowing out of it. He sat for a moment in the quiet car, thinking about meeting his aunt and wondering whether she would remember him at all or if she was too far gone. There was a movement in the lighted doorway, and his uncle’s head emerged, followed by the rest of him. He carried an empty cardboard box, which he tossed aside, waving cheerfully at Calvin before switching off a light on the outside wall and shutting the shelter door.

  Calvin climbed out of the car, taking the box that Shirley Fowler had given him. His uncle stood there smiling, wearing a sport shirt, a pair of Bermuda shorts with suspenders, and beat-up leather slip-on sandals. He said, “Welcome to New Cyprus, Cal. I was just loading supplies into the shelter. Can’t tell when the next flood might rise up.”

  “But do you want to be belowground when the waters rise?” Calvin asked.

  “By heaven, you’re right,” his uncle said. “What we want is an ark. Maybe the two of us can knock one out while you’re here.” He put out his hand and Calvin shook it. His uncle had the same jolly look about him that Calvin remembered—the same edge-of-laughter smile, the conspiratorial wink. He had always been stout, and the extra pounds gave his round face an almost youthful look. He seemed tired, though, borne down by gravity, as if life had gotten hard for him at a time when he would have been better off taking it easy. Let that be a lesson to you, Calvin told himself. Taking it easy wasn’t something to be put off.

  “Did you bring that grape soda?” his uncle asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” Calvin said, and he handed over the substitute Aunt Iris box before heading around to the passenger side of the car.

  His uncle looked at the box and nodded, not saying anything about the Gas’n’Go address.

  “You know a character named Fred Woolsworth?” Calvin asked him.

  “Never heard of him,” his uncle said. “Woolsworth?”

  “Yeah, like ‘money’s worth.’ He said he was a friend of yours, and that he knew Dad back in Orange City in the old days.”

  “That doesn’t tell me much. I never heard of any Woolsworth.”

  “Says he lives in Bullhead City. Drives an old green pickup with a bad muffler.”

  “That sounds like a fellow named Bob Postum. Beard? Heavyset?”

  “Yeah. Longish gray hair. Maybe seventy. He’s big, but he looks fit enough, like he could take care of himself if he had to.”

  ‘That’s Postum. He told you his name was Woolsworth? That’s typical. Lowball sense of humor. It’s stretching it a little if he told you he’s a friend of mine. We wouldn’t let him into the Knights. Wrong pedigree. In fact, he tried to buy the old Brewer place right upriver there through a second party, but it … fell out of escrow, you might say.”

  Calvin hefted out the case of soda and set it on the trunk. “I might be wrong, but I think he might have stolen the box with the veil in it—the one I got in the mail from Warren Hosmer. I don’t say that he did, only that he might have. Someone broke into my car when I was in Shirley Fowler’s store—she sends her regards, by the way—and when I came out the trunk had been opened and the box was missing. Whoever it was left the trunk unlatched, too, like they wanted me to know they’d stolen it.”

  “Pride goeth,” he said. “Are you sure you didn’t leave it back home?”

  “No chance. Like I say, I don’t know that Postum stole it, because I didn’t see him do it, but somebody took it out of the car when I was in the store, and Postum is the primary suspect. I didn’t make any other stops on the way out here. Also, there was another weird thing. I’m virtually certain his truck passed me heading west, maybe fifteen miles before I got to the store. Might have been a different truck, because I wasn’t really paying attention, and there was a lot of glare, but it was pretty much the same vintage and with the same hole in the muffler. I’d bet a nickel it was him.”

  “So you think he was looking for you? He was cruising up and down the highway, and when he spotted you he turned around and came back to steal the box?”

  “I don’t know what to think. I guess there’re lots of old pickups out here in the desert. Also, how the heck would he know it was me?”

  “Well, that’s a twenty-dollar question. What’s important is that he did. I half expected something like this, but I wasn’t sure it would be Postum. Now we know. Anybody else with him?”

  “No.”

  “Did you tell him your name?”

  “He overheard it when I was talking to Shirley.”

  “Well, he’ll be wondering whether you’re a player or just a courier, but he won’t be able to say for sure. Either way looks likely.”

  “You think he did it out of spite? Because you turned him down as a lodge member?”

  “I don’t think that quite covers it. One thing’s for sure, though—there’s more to Bob Postum than meets the eye. But like I said, I already suspected that. I just wonder how much more and how soon we’ll find out.”

  “Well, I’m sorry for losing the veil,” Calvin said. “Aunt Iris and all …”

  “You can cheer up about that. The veil in the box Hosmer sent you is a fraud. This one you got from Shirley Fowler is the real McCoy. Hosmer and I thought we’d throw out a little bait—see what kind of fish came up out of the river to gobble it up. You follow me?”

  Calvin nodded shrewdly at his uncle. In fact, though, he didn’t follow any of it and hadn’t been following it since the middle of the afternoon. Bait? And what would Bob Postum care about Aunt Iris’s veil? Perhaps there was some sort of explanation that led back to Iowa at the dawn of the Cretaceous period, some old feud—unrequited love, terrible jealousies, dead toads hung from door knockers. “What were you two fishing for?” Calvin asked. “Not that it’s any of my business.” He picked up the case of soda, the paper sack, and the Fourteen Carats book off the seat, and they set out toward the house.

  “Men,” his uncle said heavily, “and now here you are, and Bob Postum, into the bargain.” He laughed, as if it were a joke. He opened the front door and Calvin followed him into the dim interior, where the swamp coolers were evidently doing their job. The place had a wine cellar kind of cool to it, at least compared to outdoors—very still and heavy with the smell of water-cooled air, cut stone, lemon-oiled wood, and old books. The furniture was solid and dark, as if it had been built by a medieval craft guild in some distant age, which maybe some of it had been, and there were Turkish carpets on the floor and a long picture window looking out through the cottonwoods to the river. The religious art and relics on the walls and tables lent the place an air of dusty antiquity. Nothing had changed, apparently, from the last time Calvin had been here. Probably nothing had changed for the past fifty years. He liked that. The absence of change had an almost irresistible allure for him, and he could easily picture himself twenty or thirty years from now, safely content within the confines of this very house here in New Cyprus, sheltered from the world by the Dead Mountains and the desert and the desert river.

  “Tell me one other thing,” his uncle said to him, breaking
the spell. “Did Postum see Shirley give you the second box?”

  “No,” Calvin told him. “He’d already gone out, and she had the box behind the counter, out of sight.”

  His uncle nodded.

  “How’s Aunt Nettie?” Calvin asked. He trailed after his uncle into the kitchen, where he set his boxes and packages on the counter.

  He took a moment to answer. “She’s in some pain, even with the medication, which tires her out. There’s not much connecting her to the world that’s any good. She likes a can of Budweiser now and then, even though it’s against doctor’s orders, or at least the doctor over in the medical center in Bullhead. Doc Hoyle, the local man, he recommends it. But he’s a confirmed toper. Anyway, her mind drifts a little—downriver,” he said, not smiling now. “But maybe that’s for the best. Why don’t you go on out back and see what she’s up to? Don’t hesitate to make things clear to her. She wants a little encouraging sometimes.”

  Calvin went on alone in no real rush, through a den decorated with odds and ends from an Arab bazaar—draperies and cushions and stamped brass plates and a hookah the size of a potbellied stove. He wondered idly whether the decorations qualified as doodads or artifacts, and then he spotted a basket of woven reeds heaped with hundreds of coins about twice the size of silver dollars, each stamped on one side with the familiar equal-armed cross and on the other with the likeness of a stern-looking man that Calvin couldn’t identify. He quelled a sudden urge to pick up a big double handful of the coins and let them run through his fingers.

  He saw that his aunt was sitting outside in a webbed aluminum lawn chair under the big trees along the edge of the river. Her feet were ankle-deep in slack water that eddied slowly over a sandy bottom. A speedboat appeared on the sunlit far side of the river, coming down from the direction of Bullhead City. It was towing a skier, and as Calvin watched, the driver of the boat made a little whirly motion with his hand as a signal to the skier, and the boat U-turned and headed back upriver. Moments later, two figures floating on inner tubes bobbed past, also on the far shore, paddling with their hands to position themselves. They were quickly lost from sight, the river hurrying them along toward Needles. Then a fishing boat putt-putted into view, angling into a little bay half choked by willows. The lone occupant dropped an anchor over the side, picked up an already-rigged fishing pole, and tossed his lure into the water. The ceaselessly moving diorama reminded Calvin pleasantly of a Cascade beer lamp he had seen on the wall of a bar up in central Oregon, and he understood another piece of what it was that kept his aunt and uncle in this far-flung part of the world. His aunt seemed to be gazing out on the river as a person might gaze at the ocean or at a fire in a fireplace. Either that or she was asleep. He steeled himself for the meeting and went outside into the warmth of the evening.